Judge rejects mistrial requests in Arbery death case

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — A judge denied mistrial requests on Monday at the trial of three white men charged with murdering Ahmaud Arbery after defense attorneys claimed jurors were tainted by weeping from the gallery where the slain Black man’s parents sat with the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The morning’s testimony was largely disrupted by arguments outside the jury’s presence over Jackson’s appearance. The judge said he found one defense lawyer’s complaints last week about Black pastors to be “reprehensible.”

Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael armed themselves and pursued the 25-yearold Black man in a pickup truck after spotting him running in their neighborhood on Feb. 23, 2020. Their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan joined the chase and took cell phone video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery three times with a shotgun.

Tensions flared in the courtroom Monday soon after Jackson

sat in the back row of the courtroom between Arbery’s parents. Defense attorney Kevin Gough asked the judge to make the civil rights leader leave to avoid unfairly influencing the jury.

Gough, an attorney for Bryan, also complained last week when the Rev. Al Sharpton joined Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, and father, Marcus Arbery Sr., inside the courtroom. Gough told the judge Thursday “we don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here.”

“There is no reason for these prominent icons in the civil rights movement to be here,” Gough said Monday. “With all due respect, I would suggest, whether intended or not, that inevitably a juror is going to be influenced by their presence in the courtroom.”

Judge Timothy Walmsley declined the request. “The court is not going to single out any particular individual or group of individuals as not being allowed into his courtroom as a member of the public,” he said.

Jackson told reporters that he came to support justice for Arbery’s family, not in response to the attorney’s prior remarks about Black pastors.

“As the judge said, it was my constitutional right to be there,” Jackson said. “It’s my moral obligation to be there.”

Jackson acknowledged that it was Arbery’s mother who wept “very quietly” in the courtroom after prosecutors showed a photo of her son to a witness.